ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The story of The Lyceum begins not with a building but with a date: July 24, 1794, when the Alexandria Library Company was founded at the home of John Wise. A week later, members gathered upstairs at Gadsby’s Tavern to elect officers. That organization — one of the earliest lending libraries in Virginia — would go on to play a central role in building the structure that nearly disappeared 152 years later.
In 1838, a Quaker schoolteacher named Benjamin Hallowell joined six other prominent Alexandrians to form the Alexandria Lyceum — a place for lectures and debates at a time when public education was still a novel concept in the South. By 1839, the program had grown popular enough that Hallowell partnered with the Alexandria Library Company to build a permanent hall on Washington Street. The building opened December 12, 1839, with a lecture by U.S. Postmaster Daniel Bryan. The local paper called it “the new and beautiful Hall.”
For two decades before the Civil War, The Lyceum was the intellectual and cultural center of Alexandria — a library and reading room on the first floor, a large lecture hall on the second where musicians, debaters and traveling scholars from across the country performed. Union forces seized it in the spring of 1861 and converted it into a hospital. After the war it was sold, remodeled into a private residence, and eventually became an office building. The institution that Hallowell and the Library Company built had, by the mid-20th century, become unrecognizable…